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Billing Best Practices
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does not have the level of computerization or training to use either of these more
advanced best practices, a periodic comparison of the shipping log to the invoice
register is mandatory, in order to avoid not billing customers for shipments to
them.
Cost: Installation time:

4–12 ELIMINATE MONTH-END STATEMENTS
The employees who are in charge of printing and issuing invoices each day have
another document that they print and issue each month, the month-end statement.
This is a listing of all open invoices that customers have not yet paid. Though it
seems like a good idea to tell customers what they still owe, the reality of the sit-
uation is that most customers throw away their statements without reading them.
The reason is that the person receiving a statement, the accounts payable clerk,
does not have time to research strange invoices that appear on a supplier’s state-
ment, nor is it likely that this person will call the supplier to request a copy of a
missing invoice. Instead, it is easier to wait for a contact from the supplier, asking
about a specific invoice. By waiting, the onus of doing some work falls on the
supplier instead of the accounts payable person, which is a preferable shifting of
the workload from the latter person to the former.
The simple approach to eliminating this problem is to stop printing state-
ments. By doing so, one can avoid not only the time and effort of printing the
statements, but also eliminate the cost of the special form used to print the state-
ments, as well as the cost of stuffing them in envelopes and mailing them. Though
it is possible that the collections staff may complain that this collection tool is
being taken away from them, it is at best a poor method for bringing in errant
accounts receivable, and does little to reduce the workload of the collections per-
sonnel. Thus, eliminating the periodic issuance of statements to customers is an
easy way to shift the accounting staff away from a nonvalue-added activity,
which gives them time to pursue other more meaningful activities.
Cost: Installation time:

4–13 OFFER CUSTOMERS SECURE INTERNET
PAYMENT OPTIONS

Many prospective customers are not interested in shopping at a company’s Inter-
net store, because they are concerned that their credit card information will either
be intercepted at the point when they transmit it to the store, or that it will be kept
on file by the company, where it may be illegally accessed at any time in the
future. As long as credit cards are viewed as the primary form of payment on the